Dear CHANCE Colleagues,

Happy new year! To bring in this new year, we are playing some of CHANCE‘s greatest hits by revisiting some of the most-popular articles through the years and mixing in a few new ones.

Our first article was quite thought-provoking and one of the forerunners of today’s growing discussion regarding the use of p-values. John Ioannidis discusses why most published research findings are false!

Tatsuki Koyama then discusses how the length of the Beatles’ songs increased during the latter part of their career. (On another Beatles topic, check out Mark Glickman on ScienceFriday. John Lennon claimed to have written “In My Life,” but Paul McCartney remembers it differently. Mark evaluates who is telling the truth.)

Browsing further through the CHANCE photo album, Kevin Bales unlocks statistics from a special issue of CHANCE on modern slavery. Derek Young evaluates 007…after all, he informs us that “James Bond will return.” Peter Guttorp explains how we know the Earth is warming in his article from a special issue of CHANCE on climate change.

Let’s move to today: Data science is all the rage! Miguel Hernan, John Hsu, and Brian Healy discuss using data science to redefine data analysis to accommodate causal inference from observational data. They offer a classification of data science tasks.

Tom Adams then shares an excerpt from his exciting new book, Improving your NCAA Bracket with Statistics.

We also re-visit one of our column articles from yesteryear: Nicole Lazar discusses “Big Data and Privacy” from the Big Picture column. Nicole wraps up the article with, “To all of my students, former students, collaborators past and present, and old friends who try to connect via LinkedIn, Facebook, ResearchGate, and the like—when I don’t respond, just know that I don’t participate in any of those fora. It’s my small way of keeping a corner of privacy in the world.” I bet Nicole is good at filling out NCAA brackets.

We end this issue with Christian Robert reviewing Pragmatics of Uncertainty by Joseph Kadane; 10 Great Ideas About Chance by Persi Diaconis and Brian Skyrms; Independent Random Sampling Methods by Luca Martino, David Luengo, and Joaquin Miguez; and Computational Methods for Analysis with R by James Howard.

We hope that you enjoy the trip down memory lane.

Scott Evans

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